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from the By-the-inch,-it's-a-cinch-but-a-mile-takes-a-while dept.
We've previously discussed ( https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/12/11/1847236 ) how it becomes impossible to reverse the polarization of a community once their differences become too great, and how that plays out both here at SN and in the wider world. Science Blog has a piece ( https://scienceblog.com/527745/computer-model-seeks-to-explain-the-spread-of-misinformation-and-suggest-counter-measures/ ) about a PLOS paper titled "Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261811 ) which uses an interesting computer model to explore how this actually happens.
The model demonstrated that if the new information is too much at odds with a person's existing belief, it will be ignored. Furthermore, if that belief is connected with the person's identity, their current belief will be strengthened as a defense against cognitive dissonance. Interestingly, though, a succession of new information that gradually nudge the person to adjust their beliefs can, over time, cause the person to adopt a belief that is very different from the one they started with. This sounds like how psy-ops manipulate targets to accept extreme views.
What was the gradual change of ideas that have led national political parties to be ever more different from one another, and who fed them those messages?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @02:27PM
Just like every country has tried before. We're headed to some censorship to stop "misinformation" otherwise known as dissent.
The government knows best. They're going to sic AI on us to make us know it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @03:21PM (6 children)
Interesting subject, lots of TBD in the sim.
(For example, see Discussion/Limitations/1st para/ need to take into account the trustability of the source.)
Today's Internet seems a mixed blessing for distributing a common understanding of actual current events.
On the one hand, there is a fire hose of almost everything imaginable.
On the other hand, the economic incentive for clicks seems run counter for society's need to come to a common understanding of reality.
Given the nature of humans, one wonders how this ever worked.
The creation of random and purposefully wrong ideas is nothing new.
The ability to selectively publish far and wide to profit or to push the narrative in a particular direction, likewise.
The availability of a diverse assortment of common sense (and especially the lack therof) is not new either.
One difference is the use of s/w instead of humans to choose what to amplify to whom.
Google and Facebook could not exist at scale if they had to use humans to choose which articles to raise to the top of the list.
If the s/w is choosing to amplify that X is true to one group and X is false to another group at the same time,
then is may be profitable but seems evil in the goal of arriving at a common understanding of reality.
Old school news and politics at least had the constraint of having to publish the same trash to everybody.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @04:31PM (5 children)
I disagree with this. The internet/WWW has made it possible for every crackpot or nutter to publish their conspiracy theories on a national or even global scale. Where before they were just someone on the town square shouting their theories about aliens, now they can be heard from almost anywhere. With a domain name and a website, they can appear as respectable as any other news source, at least up front. Spreading information at a national level prior to the WWW was difficult. Now it's just a mouse click away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @04:51PM (1 child)
"The internet/WWW has made it possible for every crackpot or nutter to publish"
Yes, anybody can put something on the web, but to get a quantity of readers, doesn't social media play an important part in making it stand out enough to get a quantity of readers?
Certainly the nutter is the writer, but perhaps social media is the publisher?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:27PM
"every crackpot or nutter"
The lone gunman theory, huh? That's what the corporate+state dystopian control apparatus want you to think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @06:41PM (1 child)
oh no! won't someone think of the poor helpless invalids!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @08:28PM
your post is invalid
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @04:36PM
Your town square analogy is naive. Underground press was a thing in the 1960's if not earlier, most commonly in comic form.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=underground+comic+1960&t=vivaldi&atb=v306-1&iax=images&ia=images [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday January 16 2022, @03:24PM (2 children)
Their model uses a 0 to 6 belief score, and entirely disregards the concept of (partial) understanding. That will work for religions. It should not work at all for things in the real world. The school curriculum of 10 years should provide enough substance, at least with MINT topics, to give new information a ballpark check. If that fails in the majority of cases, all hope is lost. Mass media with their max-90 second "what did you FEEL about this" clips catering towards an "Idiocracy" dystopia doesn't help, btw.
Of course, such a check will become harder for political allegations, but history should teach that neither side is credible, and the ballpark check should simply be who profits (explicitly disregarding such claims of profit for the other side in the allegations...)... Have fun, Sherlock! :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gznork26 on Sunday January 16 2022, @04:49PM (1 child)
"Their model uses a 0 to 6 belief score..."
Submitter here. There was another interesting thing they didn't explore in that same area. The researchers tried a number of different levels of granularity, but opted to use the results from having 6. IIRC, mention was briefly made that when using the highest number of steps along that scale, there were situations where the sim didn't resolve to a result.
That sounded suspiciously like they discovered that the space they were exploring had areas of mathematical unpredictability, like in a Mandelbrot or Julia set. I'm curious about whether this is reflected in actual human behavior. If so, then the process of intentionally manipulating behavior, which we as a species are toying with via targeted messaging, could trigger Black Swan events that might best be avoided.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday January 16 2022, @05:01PM
Heh, had a hard time following you and had to read that post a few times over. I originally just wanted to point out that "belief" isn't really a solid pillar, and it should better be "assumption" (with differing grades of verification/probability), if we desire any post-enlightenment civilization.
But, with that last sentence, maybe you've found another explanation for the Fermi paradox: Once a large number of opportunistic individuals gets networked closely, a self-destructing force will be released? Much like a void-positive nuclear reactor that reaches criticality and as a result, the moderator boils off...
(Score: 1, Troll) by HammeredGlass on Sunday January 16 2022, @05:37PM (4 children)
Fuck everyone that bows to authoritarians and seeks to harm free speech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @06:34PM
Used to be that only your thoughts were truly free, but now days with technology, nothing is truly free anymore... not even speech, which originates in your thoughts, which is influenced by technology.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @06:53PM (1 child)
Are you saying "Question Authority?" Where has that old slogan disappeared to? Right down the hole of hypocrisy.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:01PM
But see he is a good lil white christian boy, their insurrections are just locker room coups.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:08PM
So everyone that voted for Trump a second time? First timers too, but some of them just didn't know better.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday January 16 2022, @06:58PM
And those institutions only lament their reduced control, but maybe chaos in the street and destruction of all credibility is the goal, make everybody out to be liars
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Sunday January 16 2022, @08:58PM (6 children)
"Divide and Conquer" describes what the global power elites are doing, and it is very intentional and deliberate. But they're doing it defensively, not in service to a greater vision. They are fighting a massive, multi-front rear guard action in service of the status quo. They like the status quo very much. They don't have to work too hard, everything is handed to them, and they can ignore the tedium to keeping a roof over their head and food on their plate and preen and strut and stroke their own egos instead; they'll kill to keep that, and the rest of us must understand that they will in all seriousness literally kill any number of us to keep it. They wax butch when they do it, and parade it to their fellows in their social set as marks of distinction.
The NSA, Wall Street Banks, IMF, and all the institutions of the global power elites are running their psyops the way Snowden disclosed to us (well worth reading what Glenn Greenwald published back in the day). They are doing it to squelch the formation of new consensuses that might threaten their cushy situations. It's why they instantly closed ranks to shut down Trump and do everything in their power to keep him from power, and to throw him out when they failed the first time; a lot of people don't understand that it's not Trump they were and are afraid of, but the people who voted for him as a new and threatening consensus. That is, they're not afraid of Trump, but of the People.
The global power elites also kneecapped Bernie Sanders in his bid for the Democratic nomination, btw, so it's not a partisan affair. The elites don't care about Party, they only care about Power.
We know they are fighting that rear guard, defensive action, because if they weren't we'd all feel pretty darned united behind some kind of new Narrative. Divide and conquer doesn't move a society forward, unity does. The power elites have no idea what to do, and everyone knows it. It's why 80% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Sunday January 16 2022, @10:55PM
"We know they are fighting that rear guard, defensive action, because if they weren't we'd all feel pretty darned united behind some kind of new Narrative. Divide and conquer doesn't move a society forward, unity does. The power elites have no idea what to do, and everyone knows it. It's why 80% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track."
===
On the nose.
Strengthening existing narratives and bending them to changing objectives is a simple way to manage a population because it leverages their existing tendencies. This fits with the conclusions drawn by the researchers. Their sim showed that if some new narrative was sufficiently different from the existing one(s), it would be ignored and the existing one would be strengthened in defense, so why not just strengthen the existing ones and bend them to your will.
The same thing has played out through history, even to new faiths subverting the beliefs and celebrations of existing ones in order to divert people to the new faiths. Wholly new narratives are usually sidelined by existing ones in hopes of extinguishing them, but some few have survived through stealth and by doubling down on the idea of being oppressed. But I don't recall there being anything as powerful as the forces currently in play to squash those.
So then, do we need a new narrative? Has the value of the existing ones been twisted and wrung out from being used as a cudgel? If what we need is a new narrative, how can that be accomplished, knowing how these dynamics play out?
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Monday January 17 2022, @01:32AM (4 children)
I think you are partly mistaken in this. There is a greater vision among at least some of the power elites: to free themselves of the unfair burden of paying their way.
As described in https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966 [amazon.com] there is a significant, organised group of the super wealthy who believe they are being exploited by the rest of us (no, I'm not joking. I wish I was). They have been destabilising liberal democracies for decades and are responsible for a large part of the crap we now face. The fact that the less insane party in the US is essentially useless has not helped.
I'm inclined to believe that Trump's takeover of the Republican party may have temporarily derailed their agenda, which is a strange, though far from delicious, irony.
__
The major
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @02:29AM (3 children)
> I'm inclined to believe that Trump's takeover of the Republican party may have temporarily derailed their agenda,
Can you elaborate? Seems to me that Trump was all about doing favors for the ultra-rich. I say this because he thinks he's part of that club, even if he isn't.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday January 17 2022, @06:50PM (2 children)
Close, but not quite. Trump was all about doing favors for himself. Nothing more than that. That others benefitted from his actions were simply coincidental.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @09:52AM (1 child)
For someone who supposedly entered the presidency to enrich himself, why did he donate his presidential salary?
https://www.ibtimes.com/trump-kept-his-promise-donated-all-his-16m-salary-federal-agencies-3168160 [ibtimes.com]
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday January 18 2022, @05:01PM
Presidents don't only make money from their 400K salary.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 17 2022, @05:02AM
The book "Common Ground", co-written by a liberal and a conservative who agree on their love for our country, points out that people are making piles from causing division. Look at the grifting that's going on, for one thing. Consider, too, that if you devote your whole network to spreading obvious bullshit, you wind up with an audience of gullible people, pure gold to advertisers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @12:09PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 17 2022, @04:44PM
Known lies, lies which the people starting them are documented as knowing are lies, have been moderated to +5 here.
A society that values free debate gets some protection that way against error and groupthink, but it is vulnerable to having the well poisoned by malicious calculated falsehoods. I don't have an answer.